


Lady of the Fountain

by Alexandra926



Category: The Martian (2015), The Martian - All Media Types, The Martian - Andy Weir
Genre: BAMF Beth Johanssen, Buried Alive, Claustrophobia / Agoraphobia, F/M, Gen, Love Triangle, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-02-11 18:47:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12941442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alexandra926/pseuds/Alexandra926
Summary: AU.  Beth Johanssen never signed up for this sort of adventure.





	1. Chapter 1

"Good Afternoon."

Sanders wore his usual solemn expression, but with none of the usual dry humor lurking just beneath the controlled exterior, Kapoor noted. Teddy collected his notes, took a deep breath, leveled his gaze in the general direction of the cameras, and began to give the press conference that no NASA administrator ever wanted to give.

It was not a good afternoon.

Even as the press corps listened quietly, focused intently on Sanders' every word, lest any new detail be revealed, the unfortunate truth was that everyone in the room already knew. This press conference was strictly for the record; the official party line from NASA. Window dressing.

Venkat sighed and looked at the floor, willing the conference to be over already.

The actual blow had fallen several hours before, when an already dangerous situation on the surface mission had spun wildly out of control.

An emergency evacuation. Total mission scrub. It was unheard of. No precedent for it. It was just another unlikely scenario in the mission book, nothing more.

But the MAV had been on the very verge of tipping over. They'd had no choice. Or if they did, it was no use arguing the decision now. Lewis had taken her best guess. Tried to keep her crew safe.

History wasn't going to remember the amount of force behind that storm, or any of the reasoning behind the evacuation. Nobody would ever remember that Commander Lewis had made the best choices she could with the information available to her at the time.

There wasn't much doubt in Venkat's mind that the crew of Ares III, the entire mission, and perhaps the entire program, would now forever be tainted by the fact that they'd left their crewmate behind.

Dead.

 _The first astronaut to die on the surface of Mars_.

History would remember that the 16th person to walk on the surface of Mars had also died there.

The news had swept through Johnson Space Center like a different sort of storm.

Kapoor sighed and shifted from one foot to the other as Teddy, at the podium, described the sequence of events, that had brought them here.

To this.

NASA's first astronaut casualty in thirty years.

It didn't seem real.

News had leaked almost immediately, of course. CNN broke the story, quoting inside sources, less than ten minutes after Commander Lewis had conferred with Flight Command. They were a public agency, after all.

They had no secrets.

Not officially.

Space travel was a dangerous occupation once again.

They had a campus full of grief-stricken employees. What would have been the point of a gag order? It wouldn't have stemmed the tide, or changed any of the facts.

"And so, at 5:15 Eastern Standard Time," Teddy was concluding, "The decision was made to conduct an emergency evacuation." For a brief, almost imperceptible moment, Sanders closed his eyes, and Kapoor could clearly see the ponderous weight he bore on his shoulders, as his jaw tightened. But he continued, impassively, "Astronauts Lewis, Martinez, Beck, Vogel and Watney made it safely to the MAV for rendezvous with Hermes, and they are headed for home."

Kapoor held his breath, bracing himself. He didn't like to hear the words, any more than Sanders liked to say them.

"Astronaut Beth Johanssen, however, was struck by debris, and killed."

The crew had been unable to locate her body, carried away, the gods only knew how far by the storm, which had reduced their visibility to near-zero. And they hadn't yet been able to explain why exactly Johanssen's EVA suit had immediately lost its uplink that should have remained solid strong? for several kilometers, even under extreme conditions. Perhaps it was destroyed by a direct hit from the untethered satellite dish,snuffing out her life in an instant.

When he stopped to consider for a moment, he was actually relieved that the crew hadn't been able to find the body. Commander Lewis had attempted a brief search, but with no beacon from Johanssen's suit and no visibility, ninety seconds just hadn't been enough time to make a difference. But that was okay, Venkat told himself; the crew had been spared the extra stressors of seeing their fallen crewmate and having to leave the body behind. There simply hadn't been time to look, and for that, Venkat was grateful.

Sanders didn't stop to take any questions when he had finished reading the prepared statement, despite the myriad shouted requests. Montrose had primed them; but that didn't stop them from asking. He gathered his notes and left the podium abruptly, head bowed. He brushed by several department heads, all of whom knew better than to try and engage with him right now.

On any other day, Venkat would have said that he knew Sanders pretty well. Maybe as well as anyone at NASA did. They'd known one another for years at work, knew each other socially as well. But he'd never seen Teddy look like that. Stooped shoulders, with tired, empty eyes that connected with nothing and no one. Just the thinnest remaining veneer of his usually stoic self.

It scared him a little, to be honest.

He was taking this personally. They all were. But Sanders had been especially fond of Johanssen, Venkat knew that. She had come to NASA's attention at such a young age, before she'd even graduated from MIT. Full of promise and ideas.

Following in Teddy's wake, he noticed Henderson, meters ahead of him, make an attempt to stop Sanders, with one hand raised, an intent expression on Mitch's face, but Teddy almost didn't acknowledge him at all. He made only the slightest gesture with one hand,  _later_ , and Henderson backed away, eyes wide.

Mitch glanced his way, and Venkat met his eyes then, and saw the same pain reflected there. He swallowed, and managed a nod in Mitch's direction. This was  _his_ crew, too. He felt responsible.

There probably wasn't a single employee in the building today that hadn't contributed to the program in some way. Made some decision, large or small, offered an opinion or suggestion, signed an invoice or conducted research. They'd all worked together to make this program, this mission, happen. They'd put their crew in harm's way and now, the worst had happened.

The very worst.

There was no going back from this, Kapoor thought. The repercussions from Johanssen's death would be felt for many years to come, no doubt.

Someday, all of the fine details would be made clear, all the questions would be answered. Maybe they would be able to learn from mistakes that had been made; maybe future astronauts would one day be safer because of this tragedy.

Today was not that day.

All they really knew, was that five of the crew had survived; but Johanssen, so gifted, burning bright with talent and potential, was no longer.

* * *

This was a new kind of darkness, she thought, hazily, when she opened her eyes. Black and disorienting; heavy.

Unsure at first whether she'd been unconscious or asleep and dreaming, she blinked several times, shaking her head as though that might bring things into focus. Make sense of things.

The first thing that caught Beth's attention was the  _darkness_ , however. Darker than the surface of Mars would ever, ever be, even considering the lack of atmosphere.

There were no stars. Nothing at all, except, when Beth stared very hard, maybe there was some sort of barely-discernible honeycomb pattern in front of her. She might have been imagining it, it was so faint.

There was nothing here, just blackness.

And no wind at all, come to think of it. That was weird, wasn't it, because…

There had been wind, wild, swirling winds, Beth was sure of it, before-

_What the hell just happened?_

And then, there was this  _darkness_ ; there was something just  _not right_  about how dark it was.

_Why is it this dark? Did I die?_

She tried to think back, trying to reconstruct what had happened, but her head was still spinning, and she felt groggy.

That was when she realized that she couldn't  _move_.

Well, that wasn't quite right.  _She_ could move. Inside her EVA suit, she could move. Her fingers and toes seemed to flex, just like normal, even if her hands were shaking a little bit from fear.

But the  _suit_  would not move, when she pressed her arms outwards, and tried to move her legs. It didn't make sense. The entire suit; it had been immobilized somehow.

_How is that even possible?_

She flexed her fingers again, and then, experimentally, pulled one of her arms back into the torso portion of her suit, and felt for her heartbeat. It was galloping along; at least double her normal resting rate. Maybe more.

 _Wait_.

Why was she checking her own stats, when her EVA suit was supposed to do all of that for her? Her temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure. All of that should have been easily accessible, at a glance, but...

The heads-up display wasn't active. And that could only mean…

_Oh no, oh my god, what the hell is going on here…._

There was a rational explanation, of course. There had to be. The suit was in low-power mode, of course. All of the unnecessary extras had been disabled; the HUD, the cameras, the voice activated menu, all of it. She'd been in her EVA suit a long time, then. Longer than a normal EVA, probably. Long enough to force the power source into contingency mode.

 _Think!_ She ordered herself to remain calm. They'd been rigorously tested for any signs of claustrophobia, and Beth Johanssen was not prone to panic attacks. She certainly didn't want to succumb to one  _now_.

 _Breathing too fast will only make me run out of air sooner_ , she told herself, willing herself to slow her respiration.

This was unnerving, though, to wake up, trapped in her EVA suit, unable to move, in pitch darkness, and not know why. It was difficult not to panic.

She tried again, and failed, to think of a scenario in which she might awaken in a dark place, in an immobilized EVA suit. Now that she took the time to assess things,the back of her head ached, Adrenaline was flowing through her now, her flight-or-fight responses ready but unable to save her.

Beth tried to force herself to breathe in slowly,  _ordered herself_ to slow the fuck down. She tried again to start over, go back over what had happened, as best as she could recall.

She exhaled, slowly, and her breath swept back across her face like a warm breeze, oddly comforting.

There  _had_  been wind.

_Strong wind. Clouds. A storm. An enormous, bruise-like stain that had bloomed across the sky, clouding over the entire Martian horizon. Bearing down straight towards the Hab. The Hab canvas snapping and shaking under the force of the storm. Houston had ordered the crew to suit up in case of Hab breach. (All six of them were already suited up or nearly finished, when Beth had read out the order, and there had been some nervous laughter.) The emergency evacuation. Yes, because of the storm. (It's going to be a lot worse, she'd told Lewis) A really dangerous storm. (We're scrubbed, Lewis had said, while Watney tried to argue with her to wait.) Suiting up. Then, they'd been walking out into the storm, headed to…_

The MAV.

Maybe she was in the MAV, she theorized, knowing right away that something seemed very off about that idea, knowing instinctively that wasn't the case. Still, her thought process ran the available information through to reach the inevitable conclusion.

No, not the MAV.

_That can't be right._

The gravity.

She knew the difference between microgravity and .4G. She was lying, not floating, inside her EVA suit. There was gravity here, even if there was something very wrong with her suit.

She wasn't in the MAV.

How many possibilities did that leave? What data was she overlooking? She had a headache, but not the garden-variety sort that she'd come to associate with microgravity… no, it felt like she'd actually taken a blow to the back of her head, and the padding in her helmet hadn't absorbed the shock very well.

_Is that why I don't remember?_

Had she completely blanked out the part where she'd made it to the MAV and the crew had launched, made the rendezvous back to Hermes, and she, the ship's reactor technician, had personally restarted the centripetal gravity?

This seemed kind of unlikely. That would be an awfully long sequence of events for there to be no trace of any of it in her memory.

Or else….

And now there was another possibility taking form in place of the discarded theories and this one had the ring of truth to it.

She tried again to move, and this time, using all her strength, she was able to move one arm inward a few centimeters. The uneven, gritty scrape of sand on the outermost layer of her suit told her all that she needed to know.

Or else….

She'd never made it to the MAV.

She was still on Mars.

It was hours or even days later.

And she was trapped beneath rubble, right now, buried alive underneath untold tons of red sand.


	2. Chapter 2

"Well, that's not good," Beth murmured to herself. Eventually her eyes began to make out some detail in her surroundings, pupils dilated hard and straining against the darkness. One small green LED, deep within her suit somewhere, provided a tiny amount of illumination, faint and ghastly.

The sound was all wrong, when she spoke aloud. The helmet's built-in comm microphone should have picked up her voice and broadcast it back at her through the internal speakers in real time.

Instead, her voice echoed dully around the inside of her helmet, sounding hollow and weird.

Not surprisingly, there was no reassuring answer from the comm link.

_Are they looking for me?_

Beth struggled hard again, trying to kick hard against the smooth, concave surface. It could only be the Hab's comm dish, judging by the size of it.

She and Martinez had teamed up to unpack the dish from one of the supply probes, and the rest of the comm system and hoisted it into place on the day of egress. She recognized the honeycomb pattern now. It had been stamped into some sort of carbon-fiber composite that was lightweight and supposedly nigh-on indestructible. Except for the place where it attached to the Hab, apparently.

_They're looking for me. I have to give them a sign, so they can know where to start digging._

She pushed up against the dish with everything she had, arching back so that she could put all of the strength of her legs into the motion.

_All I have to do is wiggle it enough to make the surface break up a little bit._

But as far as she could tell, the upended dish didn't budge at all. She let out her breath in a huff of frustration, and tried again. Again, the dish didn't move at all, but the sand underneath her did. A little bit, anyway, and then she discovered that she could use her legs to shift sand from one side to the other.

_Hmm._

Almost as if she were making snow angels from her childhood, she slowly started to hollow out the sand beneath her feet and legs. It was exhausting work in the EVA suit, and she had to stop every so often to catch her breath.

She didn't dare try to activate the heads-up display to see how much time had passed; she might not have been an electrical engineer, but she understood necessary conservation of power very well. The HUD wasn't going to help her right now. The suit would last longer the less she asked of it.

Right now, all she  _actually_ needed from it was air to breathe.

She continued, as she tried to distract herself from the prolonged physical activity, with estimating how long she'd been down.

The surface suits were rated for twelve hours of full-featured usage, even if their EVAs weren't ever actually scheduled for more than four. So, she reasoned, if the suit stayed in full feature mode for twelve hours before going into low power mode, then it was likely Sol 7 by now.

It was getting easier to kick now that she had hollowed a few inches beneath both legs and she could bend at the knees a little bit.

It was also possible, she mused, as she tried to compact the sand into a pile on one side, that the power source had been overly taxed by something, and perhaps it hadn't actually been quite that long. If it had been twelve hours or longer, wouldn't she be hungry, maybe need to go to the bathroom by now?

If, she theorized, the suit had continually attempted to reconnect to the comm system, and been unable to do so due to signal loss from being underneath the dish... the suit might have burned through more power than normal.

It was just guesswork, though. This wasn't exactly a scenario that she'd trained; whatever myriad doomsday contingency plans NASA had envisioned, they hadn't included the one on What To Do If You Should Find Yourself Buried Alive Under Martian Rubble.

_Maybe I missed that class._

* * *

Another round of kicking and moving sand had exhausted her again, but the hollowed-out area was now almost cylindrical around her, and she could roll onto her side.

Apparently she hadn't had any noticeable effect on the surface yet, or the crew wasn't looking in the right place, because there was no sign at all of any movement from above her.

If only she could get out from beneath this dish… maybe the comm system would send out a weak signal, if she was pretty close to the surface. And then also, maybe the crew could see disturbance in the sand.

_I have to start digging my way out._

There was the minor matter of not having anything to dig with.

The next step was to locate the outward edge of the dish, and from there, she was working on tunneling straight past it, one painful inch at a time.

The EVA suit was pretty well-articulated, as far as EVA suits went. Within the suit, the gloves had the most points of articulation by far; almost as many as the rest of the suit put together. The inner cavity of the gloves had been custom-fitted to her hand's measurements, with a sort of thimble-shaped metal cap covering the end of each fingertip. It allowed for fine motor skills, grasping small objects; the gloves were leaps and bounds beyond the EVA gloves of past space programs; they were the best available anywhere.

The glove design, however, was just one of many, many things designed for astronauts at NASA that were managing to walk that fine line between useful item and torture device. Human fingertips were simply not meant to be jammed against metal, again and again, for hours on end.

The suit's gloves were hell on the hands after a couple of hours under the best of circumstances; but this constant clawing and shifting sand around was something else entirely. The thimbles had soon worn her fingertips down to the quick, the nail beds split and raw. There was a stickiness there now that she knew could only be from seeping blood, and some of her fingertips were too swollen to fully extend, anymore.

But there was nowhere else for them to go, and she needed to keep digging, so she ignored them, as her hurt fingers cramped themselves into stricture, nerve endings screaming at her for relief.

Getting out from under this satellite dish was life-and-death. A little bit of fingertip pain would have to be overlooked.

In the Hab there were medical supplies, she tried to reassure herself, of course there were. Busted up fingertips were a common enough injury for astronauts.

 _A fucking painful injury,_  she thought, balling her hands up into fists and trying to take the brunt of the scraping motions with her knuckles, instead.  _Temporary._ Beck would fix it. He'd probably be grateful for some actual injuries to treat.

What would he tell her to do, she wondered idly, as she tried to shift her focus away from the pain..

Tell her to take her vitamins? Lift with her legs, not with her back?

 _He'd be worried,_  she thought, and she suddenly could see him in her mind's eye, holding her injured hands in his, with his "Worried Dr. Beck" face.

So calm, Chris Beck. Always. He had a soothing presence; a good bedside manner, some people probably would have called it. Even though his doctorly duties were more towards the research end of things, for his role as Flight Surgeon, Beth knew a little bit about his previous work as part of a trauma unit overseas.

He would know what to do, and he'd do it.

Don't worry, she wanted to tell him. I'm not quite the delicate little flower that you always seem to think I am.

_I'm good._

_I've got this._

_I can keep going._

Still, no movement from above, nothing to show that the crew was trying to get to her.

 _It's been hours now_ , she realized, dully. The crew might have bigger problems than looking for her, she thought, though that was hard to imagine. She tried not to be disappointed with them.

Perhaps they'd been forced to wait out the storm in the MAV, or there had been a Hab breach.

They were probably going to be surprised that she wasn't dead. Though right about now she was hurting so much that she felt like she was half-dead.

She felt like she'd gone ten rounds with Martinez in the ring. Not that she  _really_ knew what it was like to face off against Rick. He'd practice spar with her, sure. But he would never cross that line, from exercise to actual competition.

Didn't want her to get hurt.

_Well, too bad. I've got my knuckles bloody now, Rick._

Dig.

Scrape the sand out of the way.

Transfer it to one side, and pack it away, up against the wall.

Start over.

What would the Commander do, if she could see Beth Johanssen right now, trapped underneath her own comm dish, digging her way out with her fingertips?

Dig.

Scrape.

Transfer.

She'd probably… Beth tried to picture Melissa in her mind. What  _would_ she say, she wondered. Tell me to do it faster, probably, she smirked.

It did sort of seem like it was going faster, now that she had changed angles in the direction that she very much hoped would lead straight up to the surface. The hard-packed sand was giving way, slipping through the fingers of her gloves now, and she kicked hard with her boots until she had nearly pulled herself into a sitting position.

The sand was really moving, too, she thought.

 _There's no way they won't notice this_ , she thought, as she made a reach for the surface, swirling the sand around as she forced her way into a standing position.

"Shit," she mumbled, as she realized, too late, that the sand was actually  _too_  loose now. It was still way over the top of her helmet, further than she could possibly reach. And instead of the relative safety of the empty pocket she'd carved out underneath the dish, she was now solidly surrounded with heavy, sliding sand.

She was blinded, with nothing but black sand visible, pressing in all around her helmet. She couldn't be sure which end was up, and disoriented, she had to bite back another panic attack.

 _Breathe_.  _Think._

"Now what?" she muttered.

Endurance.

 _Vogel_ , the thought came to her in a flash. She kicked with her legs and raised her arms as far over her helmet as she could and then  _forced_ them back down again, kicking again as though she were swimming.

 _Oh my god, that really seemed to have worked._ She realized, with a start that she'd raised her position, noticeably so.

Many years ago, back in his native Germany, Alex had been a competitive swimmer. He'd actually swum the English Channel with a group from university.  _Endurance,_ he'd told them, was the key. Not just anybody could swim, without stopping, for eighteen hours.

" _Eighteen hours?!"_ they'd all chorused. But he was serious. Alex was always serious.

Kick.

Reach.

She forced her arms down again, pushing with her legs, and stopped for a minute, panting and exhausted.

She wasn't sure if she had anything left, at this point.

But there was really no telling how deeply she was buried. She could be right below the surface; or she could be nowhere close. She tried not to think about that, as she caught her breath.

 _Just break the surface_ , she told herself.  _The crew will do the rest._

Beth was just gathering herself to start another cycle of pushing, when there was a brief flash of red light and an alarm sounding, suddenly, on the internal helmet speakers that had been so quiet, for so long.

 _What the hell was that_? Her heart was already racing as she thought, beginning to panic now, that she already knew.

She knew that alarm. Remembered it from training. And it didn't mean anything good. She was out of time.

The alarm had been reduced to just a little  _squeak_ , really. Just the beginning, the first quarter-second of what the alarm actually should have sounded like.

_I can't breathe._

There wasn't enough air to fill her lungs, as she raggedy gasped, and the edges of her vision went dark. Nausea welled up, cold sweat beading on her face, and in that moment she wanted nothing more than to just sit there completely entombed in Martian sand, and just die.

Watney's voice came to her, then, as though he were standing right behind her.

"The power must really be almost gone, if it's so dead that it can't tell you that you're about to die," he would have said, with a wry smile, because that man could find a joke to cut the tension, no matter how serious the situation was.

Beth could feel herself relax a few degrees, some of the knotted-up tension leaving her shoulders as she exhaled shakily. That's what Watney would have been after, if he were here, he would have seen that she was too tired and scared to fight off this panic attack on her own, and he would have tried his best to talk her through it, with a warm squeeze to her shoulder and a friendly smile.

 _Relax_.

_Think._

It was most likely the CO2 filter alarm. The suit would be entering bloodletting mode. That meant that she was down to her final minutes, but she could still pull this out.

 _It's now or never_. Oxygen would begin to build up.

She summoned every ounce of energy that she could muster, pushing up with her legs so hard that her bruised knees scraped roughly against the inside lining of the extension joint. She didn't bother to acknowledge the pain; she just worked her arms upwards, reaching, reaching.

Her hands had broken through, she realized with a start.

Another few cycles had her lungs burning in protest but bright light began to filter in through the sand and her eyes, so used to the pitch black by now, squeezed closed against the blinding Martian daylight.

To stop now was unthinkable, and yet she didn't quite know how she gathered the strength for the final push to bring her waist up to surface level. Slowly acclimating her eyes to the brightness, she wrenched them open for a brief moment as she pulled her right leg free from the giant sandpit that she'd created.

The suit didn't allow for much movement in the torso, but what she saw with the limited field-of-vision was enough to make her eyes squeeze closed again of their own accord.

 _Oh Jesus Christ, there's no MAV_ , she realized, pulling the other leg out and sitting back heavily, squinting again across the landscape, eyes straining to confirm what she did not want to believe possible. The landing stage was there, but not the MAV.

_They left._

The Hab was still there. Still inflated, it had the nerve to still just be sitting right where she'd left it, as though nothing had ever happened. She struggled to get to her knees, and couldn't find her .4G balance. She pitched forward, and fell onto her injured hands. If she'd had any extra breath to spare, she might have screamed.

Instead, staggering, she pulled herself into an unsteady semi-standing position and started walking.

_They actually left me here._

Past the solar farm. Destroyed, half the panels buried in sand, the other half tipped drunkenly in whatever direction the wind had blown them.

_They thought I was dead, and they left me behind._

The MDV, broken apart by the storm. The struts were a pile of twisted metal; the parachute had dragged it far from where Martinez had so carefully landed it.

 _Is that what happened?_ For the first time, her eyes watered and began to well with tears.

_The left me behind, to die._

Whether it was from sensitivity to light, or her emotions finally getting the better of her, she didn't waste any time considering the matter.

She kept on moving.

_Did they look for me?_

She had perhaps half a kilometer to cover, on legs that were shaking from exhaustion, but the Hab was within sight. She was going to make it; at least that far.

Stumbling past the rover, she noted, wide-eyed, that it had been buried past the door in drifts of sand.

The other rover, sand up past the axles. It would take her days to dig it free.

 _Not like I'm going anywhere, anyway_ , she thought, blinking in shock. Her world had shrunk to the size of a regulation NASA Hab module.

And then her glove was on the lever, the airlock opened and she collapsed inside.

* * *

**SOL 8 - Hab Log**

**Apparently it wasn't enough that I got hit from behind by that satellite dish. Best as I can tell, it knocked me unconscious for several hours, and the shifting sand did the rest. Buried the dish under a meter of sand, and me underneath it.**

**The good news: The drifting sand wasn't that hard to move aside.**

**The bad news: First, I had to tunnel underneath the dish, through hard-packed sand and rock substrate, to get to it.. With no shovel. I used my gloves to scrape my way through the substrate, and tunnel past the edge of the dish, and then upwards. Eventually, I made a large enough opening, pushed my head and shoulders through, and broke through to the surface. From there, I could wiggle out the rest of the way.**

**Which is good, because by then, my CO2 filter was totally spent, along with the suit itself. I made it back to the Hab, which seems to be in good condition. Other than, you know, being empty of other humans. The first round of diagnostics indicate that everything is in working order.**

**The crew left me behind. I'm assuming that they couldn't find me in the storm, and had no choice but to leave. A contributing factor may have been that the dish was interfering with the signal from my suit. From their perspective, it may have looked worse than it was. They may have thought me dead.**

**I'd ask them myself, but… the comms dish is currently buried in sand about half a kilometer from here, and the Hab has no other way to contact Earth, or Hermes, or the DSN. Nothing. I don't know how long it'll take me to go get the dish, dig it out, drag it back here, and fix it, but I guess it doesn't really matter that much, for obvious reasons.**

**It's been two Sols since the evac. The crew, assuming they survived, have surely left Mars orbit and are headed home by now.**

**The ion engines are not designed so that Hermes can execute some sort of "stop and go back for stragglers" plan. I'm the reactor technician, so believe me, I know. They're headed back to Earth, whether they like it or not. And I don't have enough supplies here to last until the next Ares mission, four years from now.**

**Fixing the dish will allow me to be in contact with the crew, and Houston, so I will, after I give my hands a chance to heal up a little. But it's not going to change the facts.**

**And the facts aren't very reassuring.**

**My ticket to Mars appears to have only been one-way.**


	3. Chapter 3

**Log Entry: SOL 12**

**Before I started training with NASA, I don't think I'd ever even heard of delamination. Turns out though, it's actually the number one most common workplace injury for astronauts. (And mountain climbers, too. Fun fact!) Basically, delamination is where your nail beds kind of… separate from your fingertips. They crack and split, lift up, or peel off entirely. Sounds like fun, doesn't it?**

**It isn't. There are actually quite a lot of nerve endings in your fingertips, and delamination is slow to heal, more on that here in a bit.**

**Well, after my real-life Dig Dug adventures of Sol 7, I now have a pretty impressive case of delamination on eight of my ten fingertips. My thumbs were spared, thankfully.**

**The best course of action, to promote healing is to keep the area moisturized, and wrap the fingertips with cotton and medical tape for counter-pressure.**

**And, presumably, stop doing whatever it was that caused the original injury.**

**Wearing EVA gloves, in my case. And digging at things with my fingertips. Which doesn't exactly bode well for my planned EVA to dig up the satellite dish and bring it back to the Hab for repairs. Assuming that it wasn't damaged beyond repair, it will take quite a while to assess and complete the re-installation. And that would be true even if my hands were healed enough that I could start tomorrow.**

**Interestingly, there is some evidence to suggest that the lower relative gravity of Mars will make the healing process take longer than it would on Earth. Astronauts tend to be a pretty careful lot. (NASA doesn't generally like to hire the risk-takers, with the possible exception of Major Martinez.) But on the rare occasion that one of us** _**does** _ **get injured in space, it would seem that due to the slower way that fluids spread through the human body, it doesn't allow for as much cellular regeneration. Bruises take a few days longer than usual to heal, a virus would take twice as long to run its course, that sort of thing.**

**On the bright side, the odds of infection are probably quite a bit less than they would be on Earth. There's simply less pathogens to be had, here in the Hab.**

**Most of the usual methods of spreading infection on Earth don't really apply to me. My food source is completely processed and sterile, so is the water from the Hab's water reclaimer. There's no other astronauts around for me to trade germs with. Even the Hab's toileting facilities are more sterile than most.**

**On Earth, the average healing time for a delamination runs about three weeks to a month. I can probably add 50% to that timeframe, because of the lower gravity, coupled with the fact that I can't actually completely stop wearing EVA gloves during the healing process. Certain things will have to get done during that time frame.**

**Right now, though, with bandaged-up fingers, that are still moderately swollen, to boot, I can't even think about getting my own EVA gloves on. They won't fit properly, and I'll just re-injure myself if I try to force the issue.**

**See, EVA gloves are custom fit; tailored to the astronaut who wears them. The finger thimbles in mine were placed based on measurements they took in the early days of my EVA training. I have two pairs with me, as well as a couple more back on Hermes that aren't going to do me a lot of good. I have the beat-up, completely destroyed ones from my flight suit, and the ones for my surface suit. They're interchangeable, though in theory that really shouldn't ever need to happen. Mine have my name engraved along the outside edge of the joint, so it would be pretty unlikely that I would accidentally connect the wrong set to my suit, after a cleaning or inspection.**

**After a little trial and error, though, I was able to swap them out for Watney's, which were a close enough fit for me to make a couple of short EVAs to dust off the solar panels and take a visual assessment of the exterior of the Hab for my observation reports.**

**Typing with only my thumbs has been… a hit-and-miss experience, did you see what I did there? So I've been using the voice-activated menus as much as possible.**

* * *

**Hermes**

Towards the middle of the ship, where Watney was seated alongside the rest of the Ares 3 crew in the Rec, there was only about half the amount of artificial gravity, in comparison to further out. It was enough that his arms had the tendency to want to float, so he kept them crossed, and leaned forward on the table a little bit, to distribute his weight.

Lewis, as usual, didn't sit, but instead paced as she spoke. She seemed to avert her eyes from Mark's end of the table, where there was an empty seat.

Beth's seat.

"And so," Lewis was saying in conclusion, her demeanor careful and all-business, "we'll each have a couple of days to write down what we'd like to say about Johanssen."

If Lewis hadn't slipped for a brief moment and directed a worried look towards Beck, seated in the far corner, Mark might not have even realized that anything was unusual.

Beck was, apparently, ignoring her, with a fixed, thousand-yard stare.

"Tell them what you liked about her, or about the work you did together, and Henderson will read our statements at the funeral. He'll be our…" she trailed off, glancing at Beck again, "representative."

"You okay, man?" Martinez was asking Beck. "Do you know what you want to say?"

"I'm fine." His reply was impassive and sounded civil enough, and Mark thought that maybe someone who hadn't spent two years working with this man every day might very well have believed him.

But there were no takers at this table, in the Rec, least of all Mark.

It had been six days since they'd returned to Hermes, and five since they'd left Mars orbit and begun the return trip to Earth.

Six days since the storm, and the emergency evacuation that had ended with their crewmate being killed.

And still, things on Hermes had to be done; Mark had assumed most of Beth's duties as Sysop, while Vogel had taken on her role as reactor technician.

Mark had hardly noticed the extra work hours. If he were being honest; it provided just enough of a distraction to keep him from completely losing his damned mind.

It was clear that the crew was in survival mode at this point; and yet, they still managed to make it through the daily work schedule despite everything that had happened.

But everyone had their breaking point, and when Lewis had continued along, detailing how Beth's funeral would be handled, back on Earth, Beck had apparently found his.

He was up and across the Rec, and had shouldered his way past Lewis and out the door, before any of them noticed that he was leaving, let alone before anyone could react.

This was a sanctioned crew meeting, and leaving before they were dismissed by Lewis; well, it simply wasn't  _done_. It was insubordination, plain and simple; and even though Beck was no longer active-duty, it was a serious offense if Lewis chose to report that kind of behavior to the military higher-ups.

The rest of the crew exchanged worried glances, and when Lewis did not manage to finish her sentence, staring at the open doorway in mute shock, Martinez ventured, "He didn't mean any disrespect, ma'am."

She nodded briefly, and glanced around again, her gaze settling on Mark. This sort of interpersonal thing was not at all her specialty; but delegation was.

"I'll talk to him," Mark volunteered, before the Commander was forced to ask.

* * *

It seemed to Mark that it had been decades ago since he had emerged from the purgatory that NASA called the Selection Process, though it really had only been a little over two years now. But early on, some head-shrink or other had pointed out, probably to some other head-shrink, that Mark Watney seemed to have a talent for diplomacy.

Sure, his methods were not the usual ones, but disarming a disagreement between two colleagues by making them see the humor in it; that was second nature to him.

Usually people didn't even realize that he was doing it; he could be subtle about it when he chose.

"Beck?"

He'd turned his head towards the wall, though, and didn't respond.

"Chris?"

He tried again, and again, got no response. He sat down, on the exam table, not sure what to do.

And of course, found his answer.

He waited.

Time passed, in silence, and sure enough, the tension started to recede from the room. He'd talk when he was ready; no need to rush.

There was only the whir of the pressurized air filtering, and the deep thrumming of the engines, propelling all of them home, back to Earth, as Mark waited for Chris to start talking.

"I think I must be cursed," Beck said softly, several long minutes later.

Mark made to scoot quickly away, with a mock-horrified look on his face, and for a fleeting instant Beck smirked back at him.

"You're not cursed," he said, authoritatively.

"You don't understand," he said finally, in almost a whisper, voice breaking. "Everyone I love. They die."

Mark wasn't sure if Chris even knew what he had just said.

"I do understand," he replied, putting a tentative hand on Chris's shoulder.

Chris turned his face back to the wall, shuddering slightly, shoulders shaking.

"She was crew," Mark said, simply. Soothing. "Family. We lost a member of our family."

 _Family_ , Beck thought. That word, to him,  _family_ , that meant his parents, who had been speeding on icy roads one long-ago winter evening. Selfish, indulgent people who he could barely credit with the title of  _parents_. They'd left two small children orphans, simply because his father had liked to drive fast and his mother hadn't liked to tell him not to.

 _Family_  was something that other people had.

"No," came the choked response. "No. She was, Beth…" Mark patted his shoulder, trying to help console the man as he cried. He felt like crying, himself. "She was more than that," he continued. "To me."

She'd been so much more.

All that potential.

"I loved her," he said, trying to sum up his feelings for Beth, and somehow not managing to, despite the bold words.

Eyes wide, Mark tried to lean far enough to look at Beck's face.

Was he understanding correctly? Beck had a tendency to be a bit difficult to read under normal circumstances, but… Mark couldn't stop himself from trying to clarify.

"What do you mean? Are you saying that you and Beth were-"

"No," Chris said, trying to gather his thoughts. He turned back towards Mark, wiping his eyes. "Sorry," he apologized. Mark shook his head wordlessly. He was not having any of Beck feeling like he needed to apologize for having feelings.

"We never got that far," Chris continued.

"Man," Mark lowered his head. "I'm so sorry."

"I loved her, you know." The words sounded as though they were being burned out of him.

"I know you did," he sighed, "I know," and he nodded in agreement, not even realizing that he was doing it.

Chris was looking at him now, eyebrows raised.

"You loved her too, didn't you?"

Mark had a lump in his throat, as he nodded, unable to give voice to the words, wishing that he hadn't given himself away.

"I'm sorry," he said, instead.

"No," Beck told him, shaking his head. "Don't be sorry for that."

"But she would have had to pick," he mumbled. "Not fair." His eyes threatened to spill over now, too. "And I wasn't the one she wanted, anyway. And it wasn't ever the right time."

"I wasn't going to," and Beck swallowed hard, trying to keep his composure, "say anything, do anything, until after we got home."

"Yeah," he agreed. "I wasn't going to tell her 'til after, either."

"Did she know?" Chris asked, looking away, "You think?"

Mark felt oddly exposed, with this, his one deepest secret, laid bare, in front of the one person with whom he never should have wanted to discuss it. It should have felt awkward, he supposed, and it was, but it actually felt comforting, too.

"No," he said, sounding uncertain. "I don't know. Maybe she did. She was pretty smart," Mark tried to find a smile, and found that it still worked, surprisingly.

"Our girl," Chris agreed, with a shaky grin of his own. "Wicked smart. Bet she knew both of us idiots were crazy about her."

"She wouldn't have picked me," Mark said, ruefully. "You'd have gotten her in the end."

"I didn't make her laugh the way you did," he replied, with a wistful smile. "I never could. She'd have picked you."

"Oh no, but I saw the way she looked at you. That time when she was getting her.." he trailed off, gesturing to his own bicep, where his number 17 was hidden, beneath his uniform.

"I don't know about  _that_ ," Chris countered, reminiscing, with a small smile. "You took her down to the beach that time, though, just the two of you. You were gone all day." Beck looked at him, clearly still curious about that afternoon, almost a year ago, now. "I was so jealous, man, I swear… you didn't come back until so late."

Mark laughed. "Oh, no." He shook his head ruefully. "Nothing was going on, there. Seriously? I had to drive down to A&M, out on Pelican Island, to see some botany project that a colleague of mine had just published. Beth just wanted to see the beach, take a break from training. And she tagged along and she was bored to death, trying to be polite. We didn't get to the park til almost dark. Nothing happened."

It hadn't been nothing to Mark, though. It had been winter, and the sand had been cold and damp as they'd sat, watching the sunset together, with the chilly ocean wind blowing over them. Mark tried not to think of Beth, with her legs hugged to her chest, gazing off at the horizon with a soft smile on her lips.

It was a bittersweet memory.

If there had ever been a time when Mark had thought that he'd had his chance with Beth and blown it, that had been the moment.

"She would have picked you," Chris said again, seriously, and for one brief moment, Mark could almost believe it.

"No, I really don't know," he said, finally. "You were the one she wanted to hold on to, that time when we went to get our numbers tattooed. You were the one she wanted when she was scared."

Chris closed his eyes, remembering. He'd never touched Beth that much, before or since. She'd wanted him to hold her hands, both of them, to help her stay perfectly still while the tattoo artist did his work. Holding her hands, small, and deceptively strong, in his hands, and the way she'd held eye contact with him the whole time; simply amazing. And after, when she'd looped both her arms around his neck and thanked him for it, a soft whisper in his ear, only meant for  _him._  Hugging him like she never wanted to let go. It had felt like flying, even as he'd stood there stiffly, frozen in place with his arms at his sides, not sure if he should or could return the embrace.

Like Mark, he'd almost let himself believe, for just a quick second there, that it was because Beth liked  _him_ best. Liked him like  _that._

But the moment had vanished just as quickly, under the watchful eye of Lewis. And Beck had been too shy to try to reinitiate after Beth had pulled away from him, reluctantly, he'd thought, at the time. And then, that moment, his one, best chance, had been gone. Just like Beth.

"It was as close as I ever got," he admitted.

"I'm sorry," Mark said quietly. "God, I miss her."

"Me too," Chris agreed, and they lapsed back into silence, with just the noise of Hermes around them. The slight rumble and occasional creak of metal. The small hiss of the pressurized air filtering.

"I don't know what I can possibly say about her, for the service," Mark said thoughtfully, "that would make any difference."

"Yeah, exactly," Chris replied quickly. "I mean, I know I've got nothing that's going to mean anything to the people who didn't already know her."

"I mean, you know everyone's just going to be listing off all her accomplishments for the record books, how old she was when she graduated from this program or that one."

Chris sighed.

"All that stuff, I mean, it was impressive, but it wasn't  _her_."

"Not even close," Mark agreed.

" _All_  of the crew has some sort of story like hers," Chris said, thinking.

Mark nodded. "Yeah, I mean, I can see where outsiders would think all of that was the most amazing thing about Beth Johanssen. But to us, to the crew..." he trailed off, failing to find the right words.

"It was our common ground," Chris finished for him. "It was just the thing that brought us together in the first place."

"But it's not like we can say  _that_ ," Mark observed. Nobody would understand.

Beck didn't reply, and Mark thought again, how unfair it was that Beth would only be remembered by the general public for the manner in which she had died.

"Do you think you could sleep, now?" Mark patted the bunk next to him.

"Every time I close my eyes..." he began. He paused and took a deep breath, but Mark didn't need him to continue to know exactly what Chris was about to say.

"You see her?" Mark finished, and Chris nodded, frowning.

"The dish, hitting her…" he said, squeezing his eyes tightly against the vision of it, in his mind, shaking his head.

Mark nodded in understanding.

"I keep seeing her, too. Holding out her hand to me, like if only I could have…"

"Grabbed onto her," Beck supplied. "Kept her safe."

"Yeah." Mark sighed.

_If only._

"You tired, man?"

"Yeah," he admitted. "It's been a long day. But this, it's kind of nice," he trailed off, not sure how to say what he was feeling, without it sounding weird.

Mark  _was_ tired, too, suddenly. Worn down by the stress of the last six days.

He wanted to stay. Not go try to sleep in his own empty bunk. His bunk was next door to Beth's, which was empty, now and forever. He didn't want to see that door, walk past it, be forced to acknowledge again that she was gone.

"Nice?" Beck looked at him now, amused. "You're just having a super time, when I'm all, like this?" He wiped at his eyes again, with a sad smile.

"Nice to be here. Talking with someone that loved her, too. Someone that understands," he finished, and Beck nodded in agreement.

"You're right," he said, laying back on his bunk, looking exhausted. "Take the exam table, if you want," he gestured to the other bunk across from his, that doubled as a lab station, or a sick bay, when needed.

"You don't mind?" Mark looked at him, not wanting to intrude. "You're sure?"

"Don't want to be alone," he said, closing his eyes.

"Me neither," he murmured, and he moved over to the exam bunk and laid down on it. Beck flicked out the lights, then, and tossed his extra blanket to Mark.

"I would've married that girl," he admitted, softly, into the dark room.

"I would have been your best man," Mark averred.

"Or I would have been yours," Beck said, with a quiet chuckle.

"I would have married that girl, too," Mark said slowly, thinking about what was never to be. Beth was gone, and she was never going to see another sunset.

Dead on Mars, frozen and alone.

"G'night."

"Yeah, good night, man."


	4. Chapter 4

**Sol 19**

**Hab Log**

**Today was the first day that I was able to put on my own gloves without screaming, so in honor of that… milestone… today was also the first day that I finally started working on my plan to get the Hab's satellite dish back up and operational.**

**Yesterday's EVA included another inspection of the support pole for the satellite dish; basically, a hollow metal tube that Watney and Vogel drilled into the ground on Sol 2. The pole doesn't appear to have been damaged in the storm; it is the mounting bracket that's going to give me trouble.**

**See, the mounting bracket is this cunning little piece of technology that secures the large, heavy dish to the support pole. It's not a particularly heavy piece of equipment; the flight supplies manifest informs me that it was made from titanium, by a casting outfit in San Jose, which is my hometown. A solid titanium casting should (in theory) be very strong. Martinez and I didn't even need the power tools to put it together on Sol 2. He lifted the dish into position while I cranked the housing bracket and then secured it with some bolts, using a hand tool. Simple.**

**I'm really hoping that the mounting bracket is still in one piece, somewhere, and I can find it.**

**So far, it hasn't turned up.**

**I could probably rig up a rudimentary metal detector, using one of the radios, but I still wouldn't be able to use it to find the mounting bracket.**

**Why not?**

**Well, simply put, because metal detectors are great at finding ferromagnetic metals, like iron. And Martian soil is notably quite high in iron content, of course. The sort of metal detector that I could build would still be able to detect diamagnetic metals, such as aluminum and titanium, but the iron would just act as a masking agent.**

**In short, metal detectors just don't work on Mars, and now you know why!**

**Tomorrow's plan is to dig up the dish itself, and it's just this side of possible that the bracket is still connected to it, just popped open under the stress.**

**One minor problem with this whole digging plan is that flight supplies did not actually send a full-sized shovel with this expedition. I am not using my fingertips again. To hell with** _**that.** _

**Watney's planned botany experiment included a trowel, but it's a flimsy, lightweight thing and very small, besides. If I tried to do any serious excavation with that poor thing, I would bend it in half, no doubt, long before I actually managed to dig up the dish. I also have a soil sample drill, but that's intended for hard packed regolith, not drifts of dust.**

**I'm going to need something much larger, to use as a scoop, to get the foot or so of loose sand out of my way, first.**

* * *

**Hermes**

The mission days continued to pass. The onboard clock was apparently unaware that the mission simply could not go on without Johanssen, and the hours and days flowed onward anyway, without her, as the crew tried their best to cope.

Sessions with the flight psychologist on Earth were just one of many extra time devices that reminded Mark, every day, that they were now five instead of six.

Nobody drank coffee in the morning anymore. Coffee had been Beth's job. It had been Beth who dealt with the temperamental microgravity coffeemaker.

He supposed that he could make it himself; he knew where the coffee was stored. He knew which switches to use, to operate it. But that had been  _her_  domain. Nobody else seemed inclined to take it away from her either.

Instead, without discussing the reason why, they had all switched to drinking juice with breakfast. He couldn't even remember making that decision, but it was part of their "new normal" now.

Mark sipped his grape juice, silent, as he mentally mapped out his tasks for the day. Lab work, mostly, though a good portion of Beth's duties tended to wind up on his and Vogel's schedules.

Vogel was the backup reactor technician; if the added duties interfered with his own chem lab work, he never mentioned it. Just as Mark would shoulder the addition of the Beth's SysOp duties when they appeared in the day's schedule block.

Beck had also wound up with more hours of scheduled mission time than before Mars. He had mental health protocols to add to his usual duties, and he frequently worked late into the evenings before retiring to his bunk, which he continued to share with Mark.

Whether Commander Lewis was aware of the change of accommodation, Mark couldn't say. But if she was, she said nothing; at least not to him.

Mark slept on the exam table, returning to his own bunk each morning for a change of clothes, after he showered and shaved.

It seemed to make things more tolerable, and neither he nor Chris seemed to feel like deconstructing or discussing it; it was just another facet of the "new normal". The sound of another person's breathing helped to lull him to sleep, and sometimes they talked about Beth together, a subject verboten by the other crew except when absolutely necessary.

Beth was dead, therefore he would never again drink coffee, but he  _would_  sleep on a narrow cot in Beck's bunk. Because that was just how things operated now.

Maybe it didn't make sense, but it was enough to help him get through the days and nights, and he felt like he'd better not question his coping methods too closely, lest it all come tumbling down like the proverbial house of cards.

**SOL 19**

**Hab Log (cont'd)**

**I've got it! I'll use a piece of the fairing from one of the supply probes. It's a little larger than a typical shovel would be, but it's almost the right shape, and definitely strong enough.**

**This particular fairing was part of the supply probe that landed one of the rovers; it was made of eight smaller pieces that fit together. It probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to design and produce. I'd rather have a $20 shovel from Home Depot, but this should work.**

**Who invented the shovel, anyway? It was a…** _**ground breaking** _ **invention, am I right?**

**Wow, I made** _**myself** _ **cringe.**

**I need other humans to talk to, stat.**

**Tomorrow I'll get started on the digging.**

**Tonight is going to be all about me trying to get some decent sleep.**

**Maybe you're wondering why I'm even tired; haven't I been doing pretty much nothing but hanging around here waiting for my hands to heal, not expending very much energy?**

**Well, yes, but there's a small catch.**

**Body temperature.**

**Back on Earth, of course, humans have an average resting temperature of 37C. Or 98.7 F, for any Imperialists following along.**

**From that "norm" of 37, natural variation might be one degree higher or lower than that. Anything over 38, though, and you're most likely harboring some sort of infection.**

**When you're fighting an infection, of course, your body temperature rises a little bit to help the immune response; good for speeding up white blood cells, but with the general side effect of making you feel like crap. When you're running a fever, you can expect a headache, general fatigue, dehydration, and a host of other symptoms.**

**Well, fun fact: in microgravity, and here on the surface of Mars as well, astronauts have a resting temperature of 38C instead of the usual 37.**

**Why? Doctors aren't really sure. What we do know is that the base normal body temperature of an astronaut slowly creeps up, over the course of three to four months after launch.**

**By the time the Ares 3 crew is arriving in Martian orbit, my base temperature was already well past 38C. My body now thinks that it's harboring an infection. All the time. And in the unfortunate event that I do manage to actually contract a virus, my immune system would have a very rough go at fighting it off. Which is why the powers that be insist on a ten day quarantine before an astronaut ever boards the shuttle to Hermes in the first place.**

**Smaller, more lightly-built astronauts tend to start showing signs of "space flu", as we call it, sooner, on average. By the time Ares 3 had reached the halfway point during the Marsward part of our mission, I was already having a difficult time sleeping. And then there's the digestive issues; persistent diarrhea, cramps, and nausea. Especially in the morning.**

**Sounds like fun, right?**

* * *

**Sol 20**

**Hab log, cont'd**

**The good news is that my improvised shovel from the supply fairing worked pretty well. The excavation was a success. I'm happy to report that the Hab dish is once again located where its name would suggest.**

**My hands hurt pretty bad after nearly a full Sol's digging. Maybe digging is the wrong word to describe what I was doing. It was more like scooping up fairings full of red dust, at a faster rate than said dust can slide its way back to the bottom of the hole I was trying to dig. Also, I was doing all this with very low visibility; because once the dust is kicked up, it takes an absurdly long time to settle. It was a pretty thankless task, and I had to make myself quite a crater to get a good perimeter around the dish.**

**Using the end of the fairing as a lever, I got the dish upright, and then rolled it on back here to the Hab, like a big wheel of cheese.**

**And now, the bad news.**

**I found the mounting bracket.**

**It's ruined.**

**It's late, and I'm tired, and I'm not even sure what I'm going to do about that.**

**Time to go soak my hands.**


	5. Chapter 5

**Hab Log**

**Well, I guess I've really gone and done it, now. Whatever slim-to-none chance that may have existed, to get myself out of this situation in one piece, is officially gone. I'm done.**

**When I last updated this log, you might remember that I spent the better part of two Sols planning and digging out the Hab's communications dish. It was buried during the sand storm of Sol 6, of course, with me underneath it, and the dish itself is in relatively good shape.**

**The structure to which it was originally attached also seems to be in good shape. And then, of course, there was the coupling that held the two of them together. The sustained forces from the wind storm snapped it clean in half.**

**My plan** _ **was**_   **to repair the coupling, and then remount the dish, and reestablish contact with** _ **Hermes.**_   **I would have needed to patch together the severed cables, of course, but I have plenty of spares. That's not my problem.**

**Notice I use the word "was". As of now, my plan is for nothing, because I totally destroyed it. I attempted to solder it back together, and now the coupling no longer exists, except as a melted piece of slag.**

**I've done my share of soldering over the years. Usually on small items, circuitry, maybe a power supply here and there. I figured I knew what I was doing. Of course, if the rest of the crew were here, I would probably have been, quite literally, the last crew member that would have been in charge of repairing a broken coupling. I'm just the reactor tech, and Sysop of Hermes.**

**After some careful consideration, it seemed unnecessarily risky to do the soldering inside the Hab, so I decided that outside was safest.**

**But you see, heat doesn't dissipate properly in Martian atmosphere, and I didn't account for that. While I had no trouble getting the solder iron hot enough, the heat just melted the coupling into a puddle.**

**It was so stupid.**

**Any of the other crew members would have known right away to do the soldering inside the Hab, but not me.**

**I always seem to have to learn things the hard way.**

**Well, there's nothing to be done about it now.**

**But it was stupid. It's the final nail in my coffin here, and I should have thought things through.**

**So that's that. There will be no fixing the dish. No contact with the crew. No contact with NASA. No opportunity to beg them for a resupply probe or a rescue mission. They all think that I'm dead, and will continue to think that. Nobody is ever going to get the chance to read this log. Because about a year from now, everyone who already thinks that I'm dead will be correct. I'll run out of rations and die.**

* * *

**Hermes**

"And here's something that you may not have ever thought about, guys," Mark continued for the benefit of his classroom, back on Earth.

As the crew's public relations man, it was usually Mark that wound up hosting the weekly live chat. This week's talk had, strictly speaking, not been on the schedule at all. But with the surface mission scrubbed, Montrose had decided to be proactive, and get the crew back into their routine.

"But it's actually pretty hard to get good coffee in space," he continued, gesturing to the coffeemaker, mounted to the galley wall.

"Well, you guys are in middle school. So maybe this is not something you kids have worried about a whole lot. But can any of you guess  _why_  it's hard to make coffee in space?"

He paused for a minute, as though the students watching the telecast were able to suggest reasons, even though there was a significant amount of time drag, and their answers wouldn't be reaching  _Hermes_ for eleven minutes or so.

"It's gravity, yeah," he nodded, as though one of the students had hit upon the correct answer. "Coffeemakers work completely differently in space." He demonstrated, by removing an empty coffee packet from one of the galley drawers, and attaching it to the output valve.

"Now, back on Earth, gravity would  _pull_  the water through the ground-up coffee beans, and it would flow," he gestured to the coffeemaker, "from top to bottom. Boiling water goes in, up here, hot coffee comes out, down here."

"Yeah," he said, shaking his head sadly, with a grin at the camera. "That's not going to work here on  _Hermes._  Our centripetal gravitational pull is less than half of Earth's. And that's not all the time, either. Sometimes, we have none, or very little, gravity; microgravity, in other words. In microgravity, water acts differently.  _Steam_  acts differently. It doesn't flow down through the coffee. It wants to sit on  _top_ of the coffee."

He pulled a face for the camera.

"That's not going to make any kind of coffee that  _I_  would want to drink. That's going to make what we refer to, scientifically, as coffee sludge. Yuck."

Opening the front panel of the coffeemaker, he gestured to the steel piping.

"So we have to help it out a little bit. We use suction here, with this pump, to  _pull_ the water through the ground-up coffee." He closed the panel, flipped the switch, and a few moments later, coffee began to trickle into the empty packet below. As it filled, Mark continued, "And.. bonus! This even works in microgravity!"

"Now, do you know where this  _wouldn't_ work?"

He paused for the kids to have a moment to wonder, and to give the machine a chance to finish filling the packet.

"Oh man, this is awkward," he smiled, looking from side to side, as though NASA were watching. "NASA sent us to Mars, with a coffeemaker that doesn't even work on Mars," he stage-whispered.

"But actually, that's not really too big a deal, because Mr. Coffee here doesn't  _get_ to go to Mars. He's gonna hang out right here in the galley, the whole surface mission."

_The pallet from flight supply had included a flat box of Nescafe packets for the surface mission. Little flattened plastic bags with freeze-dried coffee crystals; one per crew member per day. He'd filled one with hot water for Beth the morning of Sol 6, and watched her shake it to distribute the coffee evenly, as he had begun to suit up for the day's work-_

Watney removed the filled coffee packet from the output valve, and held it up for the camera. Vogel did his best to zoom in on it, so that the students could see the bubbles floating through it, the foam swirling around strangely through it. The steam vented through the bottom of the drinking valve, dissipating in an odd cloud. Instead of dispersing as one might expect, the steam hung in the air, fogging the camera lens.

Vogel tried to fan the cloud of steam away from the camera, as Mark tried to gather his thoughts.

_Swirling clouds, black winds._

He swallowed hard and cleared his throat.

"So why wouldn't this coffee maker work on the surface mission? Anyone know?"

As soon as he'd said it, he already knew that he had no idea what the next line from the script was, even though he had been the one that had written it.

Mark took a small sip from the coffee packet, but the rich, bitter flavor brought a certain uneasiness. He had to refocus himself, looking back to the camera.

_Sol 6._

_Johanssen… disappearing…. into the storm, in the blink of an eye._

Vogel was looking at him, eyebrows raised, but Mark still stood there, dazed.

 _The script,_ he ordered himself to focus.  _What was next?_

And now Vogel was circling his free hand towards Mark; his expression was shifting towards worried.

"Why wouldn't this work on the surface mission?" he repeated, trying to remember the answer.

He cleared his throat again, and took another sip, trying to give himself another moment to get back on track.

Mark had always preferred his coffee with creamer and sugar, but his traitorous brain took this moment to loudly remind him who  _did_  like her coffee just this way.

Black and boiling hot.

_Shit._

Vogel was waiting for him. Again. His expression had changed to one of understanding. He waved down Martinez, from the nearby flight deck and mouthed something to him, as Mark's eyes searched the program notes, trying to find his place once more.

_Where the hell was I?_

Alex was pointing to the  **Boiling Point**  heading on the whiteboard behind them.

_Boiling point._

Steam hung heavy in the air around him.

_Boiling point?_

"Right. On Mars... umm… water has a lower... boiling point."

_So did astronauts. Humans had a low boiling point, too, if they'd been hit by a satellite dish that destroyed their EVA suit._

"The atmosphere…" he trailed off again, unfocused.

_Atmosphere on that hellhole had sucked the air out of her lungs instantly, suffocating her to death...and then... the blood had boiled away in her veins... she might have been conscious, even, might have known what was happening to her, as the crew was looking for her frantically, as she-_

"Thanks, Watney," Beck was saying, as he took the coffee and took a few steps away from Mark. Vogel swung the camera away, to get Mark out of frame.

"Hi," he addressed the camera, with a tentative smile. "I'm Dr. Beck."

Mark sat down at the flight console, shoulders slumped. He turned towards the workstation, scrubbing a hand down his face.

_We left her there. We left without her._

It was embarrassing, to need Beck to rescue him, mid-lecture. And Beck was, frankly, not a natural public speaker. He had stepped out of his comfort zone on Mark's behalf. He seemed to be doing alright, and Mark started to relax, a little bit.

"Wow. That's  _hot_ ," Chris was saying, consulting the lesson's outline points on the board behind Vogel. "Here on  _Hermes_ , we can have our coffee as hot as we want, just like on Earth. But it's a different story down on Mars."

Mark glanced at the screen. There was a crazy amount of packet loss, catching his attention. He pulled up the SysOp module, trying to pinpoint the problem, grateful for the distraction.

"Now, of course, it depends on  _where_ the surface mission is, the elevation makes all the difference. What if I decided that I needed some coffee when I was visiting the Hellas Basin, for example? That's one of the lowest places on Mars, kind of like Death Valley, on Earth."

He was grateful for the distraction, sure. Right up until the moment that he realized that the entire communication system seemed to be either dying or dead.

_What in the hell?_

"Things get pretty hot, down there in Death Valley, right? So does that mean my coffee will be hotter, down in Hellas Basin? What do you think?"

Vogel nodded the camera, bobbing it up and down.

Beck shook his head, sternly.

"Nope!"

Vogel mimicked his motion, shaking the camera back and forth.

"The boiling point for water is  _way lower_  on Mars. All the water down in Hellas Basin, if there should happen to be any, would boil at only 10 degrees Celsius! So, the hottest I could possibly have my coffee, without it boiling away, would be about 9 degrees Celsius. That's about 49 degrees, Fahrenheit. So yeah, it would be like drinking coffee straight out of a refrigerator. It's not even room temperature _,_ let alone hot!"

Beck glanced at Vogel, waiting for the signal to continue with the script, but he was focused on the console behind him, where Watney was looking more and more upset.

Inbound  _and_ outbound communications had gone dark now, and it wasn't a matter of calibration; there was simply no signal, and the Hermes firmware didn't offer any clues as to what was going on.

Hoping to get this disastrous live chat finished as quickly as possible, Beck skipped the normal waiting interval and went straight to the closing statements.

"And that, my sixth-grade friends, does  _not_ make good coffee," he concluded. "When you get to college, and it's time to cram for finals, you'll know what I'm talking about-"

But Beck was talking to the empty air, as Vogel lowered the camera, looking at it, perplexed.

"There's no connection."

"Why did we lose the downlink?" he asked Mark, who sat shaking his head at the flight console. "Is it coming back online?"

Mark was shaking his head. "I don't know," he replied, worried. "It's acting really weird."

Martinez tapped his headset. "Commander, we've got a problem." He looked at Mark, who was furiously typing commands into the console. "Something's wrong with the comm system."

Lewis arrived a few moments later, still gloved and gowned from the geo lab, safety goggles pushed to the top of her head. "Can you raise CAPCOM?" This was exactly the sort of situation that she had hoped wouldn't arise; the one crew member who would have known exactly what to do wasn't going to be able to help them.

"Negative," Mark replied. "There's no outbound signal at all."

**Author's Note:**

> New story! Let me know what you think, so far. Comments make my day. :-)


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